I am going to present a summary and then some thoughts on Melanie Klein’s paper “Envy and Gratitude”, first published in 1957, and more generally on Kleinian technique. We will look at key concepts and terms such as greed, envy and jealousy, as well as guilt , gratitude and generosity.

But let us begin with a piece written last year. In his book published in 2013, The Examined Life, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz writes movingly about the problem of Parents envying their children, and how it impoverishes and spoils matters for all parties. The prose is simple, yet it conveys a taster of the more complex ideas to be described in the rest of today’s lecture, and signposts some concepts like destructiveness, spoiling, impoverishment of relationships and grievance

The definition of envy used by Klein is “the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable, often accompanied by the impulse to take it away or spoil it”. Contemporary authors also recognise envy as a painful affliction.

Klein believes that envious impulses, oral and anal sadistic in nature operate from the beginning of life, initially directed at the maternal breast, and then against parental intercourse. Klein sees envy as a manifestation of primary destructiveness, to some extent “inherited” i.e. constitutionally based, and worsened by external adversity. She feels that the attack on the good object leads to a number of consequences includingConfusion between good and bad And thus difficulties with depressive position acquisition and integration

Freud’s assertion was that the little girl becomes aware of lacking a penis upon noticing the genital anatomy of the two sexes. She feels inferior, as Freud put it “lesser in so important a respect” (1925, 253) She thinks that she did possess a penis and has been castrated as a punishment for masturbation and/or imagines that she was deprived of a penis by a neglectful and unloving mother. She envies the penis for its size, masturbatory ease, and its manipulation of the urinary stream. Lacking it, she turns away from the mother to the father to obtain one from him; and the wish to have a baby is born. The wish for possession of a penis is never fully given up, it always persists in the girl and may be impervious to analysis. This penis envy was seen as “the primary organizer” of the female psyche ( Moore and Fine, quoted in Akhtar (2009), p 205) and underlines many character traits eg competitiveness with men, preferring a weak and castrated male for a partner, and neurotic symptoms such as kleptomania and vaginsmus in adult women. Gradually the concept came under increasing criticism for many reasons (Akhtar describes 10 of which I will enumerate a few) :

The entire concept of penis envy and Freud’s use of the expression of the “superior organ” for the penis represented the phallocentrism of a narrative written by and for men

1）阴茎嫉羡的整个概念以及Freud使用“上等的器官”这种方式表达阴茎，代表了阴茎中心主义者是男人，也是被男人描述。

The portrayal of female psychosexual development as disappointed masculinity ( Moore and Fine 1990,p140 , quoted in Akhtar, 206) is not only theoretically biased and pejorative, but empirically untenable in the light of child observational studies

Penis envy may be but one manifestation of envy at large….and thus can be encountered in men !

5）阴茎嫉羡可能显示在嫉羡阴茎的大小上——而这可能在男性中发生！

Such issues may not be impervious to analysis-they may not form the bedrock of the female psyche

这些问题不可能对分析无动于衷——它们不可能形成女性心理的基石。

And we will see that Klein, although obviously profoundly influenced by Freud, does not take penis envy as the main prototype or example of Envy

现在我们来看看Klein，她尽管深受Freud的影响，却并不认为阴茎嫉羡是嫉羡的主要原型。

Continuing with the history of Envy in PA writing, Freud, subsequently in 1921, in “Group psychology and the psychology of the ego” described how members of a group can forego inter-group envy and rivalries in a common idealisation of the group leader .

Karl Abraham in 1919 wrote about patients who begrudge the efforts and skill of the analyst, to appreciate him, stubbornly refusing to cooperate with him and trying to usurp his place. Abraham described envy as an unmistakable feature in this and saw it as an oral trait.

In her paper entitled “Jealousy as a mechanism of defence” Joan Riviere in 1932 suggested that in some primitive states of mind, the jealousy apparently linked to “triangular situations “may be nearer to envy. Here the deepest wish was to rob the mother of her possessions. And in 1936 Karen Horney explicitly linked the “negative therapeutic reaction” with envy of the analyst in other words, a wish to spoil the analyst’s work.

In the 1940s Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld began to analyse adult patients with schizophrenia and described how such patients typically would “mount wholesale attacks on the good object for its very goodness” .Their analysis of these extreme cases of envy was seen to help to delineate the phenomenon.

But back to Melanie Klein. Her first reference to envy is in 1928 in her paper “Early stages of the Oedipus conflict”. She sees it as emerging at the earliest stage of the Oedipus complex, as a desire in both sexes to spoil the mother’s possessions, particularly the father’s penis, which in fantasy the mother contains. In her work dated 1932, entitled “The Psychoanalysis of Children”, she gives a detailed clinical account of that small child’s envious attacks on the phantasied parental sexual relationship. She considers envy to be one of the motive forces for the fantasy of pushing into the mother’s body in order to discover and scoop out its contents. Interestingly, in this paper she describes such destructive fantasies as being linked to the epistemophilic instinct, implying the interesting paradox that the destructive fantasies have intrinsically positive value. However, in Klein’s view, such fantasies are also the deeper sources of guilt and lead to fears of harbouring hostile objects engaged in deadly intercourse, and/or threatening the self. She thus considers “actual” harmonious parents to be deeply reassuring in this respect. 回到Klein，在她第一份涉及到嫉羡的1928的文章《俄狄浦斯冲突的早期阶段》，她把嫉羡看成是俄狄浦斯情节最早期阶段发生的，无论男孩女孩都有的破坏母亲所有物的愿望，尤其是是想象中母亲还容纳了父亲的阴茎。在她1932年的名为《儿童精神分析》的书中，她详细地描述了临床上小孩对于幻想中父母性关系的嫉羡的攻击。她认为嫉羡是幻想挤进母亲身体去发现和掏空内容物的动机因素之一。有趣的是，在这篇文章中她描述了一些与求知本能有连接的毁灭性幻想，暗指有趣的似是而非，即毁灭性幻想拥有本质上的积极价值。无论如何，在Klein的观点中，这些幻想也是内疚的深层来源，导致对怀着敌意的客体在从事可怕性交的恐惧，和（或）威胁到自体。于是她认为“实际上”和谐的父母是这方面的深层保障。

In Klein’s (1945) paper “the Oedipus complex in the light of the early anxieties” she discusses envy of the mother as an ordinary part of the Oedipus complex in both genders . For the girl, she describes how penis envy and the castration complex are exacerbated by frustration of the more basic oedipal desires. She thinks that children may at one time believe that mother has a penis as a male attribute, but unlike Freud she regards this as far less important than the idea that mother contains father’s penis.

In the paper (1952) “ The origins of Transference” she spells out what she calls “the prototype of situations of both envy and jealousy”. Powerful envy, associated with frustrated oral desires, combined with a fantasy that some other person, ( typically, the father ) receives the coveted gratification, leads to a fantasy of the parents combined in everlasting mutual gratification of an oral, anal and genital nature.

In her subsequent paper “On identification.” (1955), Klein then uses a literary example to illustrate how envy could be a factor driving a person to use extreme projective identification.

在1955年《论认同》一文中，Klein举了一个文学上的例子来阐述嫉羡如何驱使一个人使用极端的投射认同的。

Her seminal paper entitled “Envy and Gratitude” was published in 1957. Here for the first time she explicitly pairs the two concepts. She refers the first time to envy of the breast earlier discussed by Riviere in 1932.

And finally, in her paper “Our adult world and its roots in Infancy” she provides a brief but comprehensive outline of the paired concepts of envy and gratitude.

她的精华文章冠名《嫉羡与感恩》，于1957年出版发行。这时她第一次把两个概念配对。

I will now try to describe the Key concepts relating Klein’s ideas surrounding Envy and gratitude . Much of this is derived from the Book “The New dictionary of Kleinian thought “ edited by Spillius and her collaborators, published by Routledge in 2011

For Klein, the tendency towards envy differs greatly between people , as does the capacity for love, and the accompanying gratitude for goodness received.

在Klein看来，不同的人嫉羡的倾向差别非常大，就像爱的能力一样，伴随着的接受好的感恩也是一样的（差别很大）。

Whilst the environment may modify these tendencies, Klein places substantial emphasis on innate factors and links envy with the death drive. In 1957 she wrote “ I consider envy is an oral sadistic and anal sadistic expression of destructive impulses, operative from the beginning of life, and that it has a constitutional basis”, and she goes on to write “In speaking of the innate conflict between love and hate, I am implying that the capacity both for love and for destructive impulses is, to some extent, constitutional, though varying individually in strength and interacting from the beginning with external conditions” (p.180) She quotes Chaucer, Milton, Spenser to support her thesis of the universally recognised basic destructiveness of envy and its opposition to love .

2. Klein distinguishes between envy, jealousy and greed, which may be confused in everyday usage. Envy is rooted in a 2 person relationship, and stimulates the impulse to take away and spoil the possession of the other. As Hanna Segal writes “envy is a two-part relation in which the subject envies the object for some possession or quality: no other live object need enter into it.” (1964, p27)

Jealousy involves a three person relationship: jealousy is based on love and aims at the possession of the love object and the removal of the rival. “jealousy is based on envy, but involves a relation to at least two people, it is mainly concerned with love, that the subject feels is his due, and has been taken away, or is in danger of being taken away, from him by his rival,” (Klein 1957, 181)

Greed is compared with envy. Klein writes “ An impetuous and insatiable craving, exceeding what the subject needs and what the object is willing and able to give. At the Unconscious (Ucs ) level, greed aims primarily at completely scoping out, sucking dry and devouring the breast; that is to say its aim is destructive introjection ; whereas envy not only seeks to rob in this way but also to put badness , primarily bad excrements and bad parts of the self into the mother, and first of all into her breast ,to spoil and destroy her….One essential difference between greed and envy, although no rigid dividing line can be drawn since they are so closely associated, would accordingly be that greed is mainly bound up with introjection and envy with projection” ( Klein 1957, 181)

So , to repeat, Greed aims at the possession of all the goodness that can be extracted from the object, regardless of consequences; this may result in the destruction of the object of the spoiling of its goodness, but in this case, the destruction is incidental to the ruthless acquisition.

Envy aims at being as good as the object, but when this is felt is impossible, it aims at spoiling the goodness of the object to remove the source of envious feelings. It is this spoiling aspect of envy that is so destructive to development, since the very source of goodness that the infant depends on is turned bad, and good introjections therefore cannot be achieved.

Segal writes : Envy though arising from primitive love and admiration has a less strong libidinal component than greed and is suffused with the death instinct. As it attacks the source of life, it may be considered to be the earliest direct externalisation of the death instinct.

Envy stirs as soon as the infant becomes aware of the breast as a source of life and good experience; the real gratification which he experienced at the breast, reinforced by idealisation, so powerful in early infancy, makes him feel that the breast is the source of all comforts (physical and mental) an inexhaustible reservoir of food and warmth, love, understanding and wisdom.

The blissful experience of satisfaction which this wonderful object can give, will increase his love and his desire to possess, preserve and protect it, but the same experienced stirs in him also the wish to be himself the source of such perfection; he experiences painful feelings of envy which carry with them the desire to spoil the qualities of the object which can give him such painful feelings.(Segal, page 27-28)

One essential difference between greed and envy, although no rigid dividing line can be drawn since there are so closely associated, would accordingly be that greed is mainly bound up with introjection and envy with projection” ( Klein 1957, 181)

As has been pointed out by, amongst other authors, Elizabeth Spillius, the terms envy and jealousy often overlap, vary in meaning and have a “large penumbra of associations”. The well-known quote from Shakespeare’s Othello, being a good example.

Envy, jealousy and greed are frequently found in close association . Greedy acquisition, for example, can be a defence against being aware of envy of those who have, or are, what one wishes for oneself. Where envy is strong, jealousy is bound to become stronger and more difficult to overcome.

The immediate result of an envious spoiling of the good breast is that the essential primal splitting into good and bad is interfered with. The spoiled good object cannot be introjected in a proper sustaining way. The damage caused to the breast by the envy, is also an ucs source of premature guilt, which is then felt in a paranoid way as an external and an internal threat

Klein lays particular emphasis on the fact that envy leads to psychic attacks on the goodness of the object, which if unchecked, lead to great difficulty in taking in and learning. As envy leads to attacks on the goodness of the object, it is likely to result in confusion between the object’s goodness and badness which impairs processes of differentiation and of the development of rational thought. Mild manifestations of the confusion caused by envy may be indecision and muddled thinking. Severe state of confusion caused by envy are characteristic of psychotic states as Rosenfeld was later to show. Confusion in a different sense, between internal and external world, and between self and other, occurs as the result of strong projective identifications in an envious individual.

Furthermore, the confusion between the object goodness and badness impairs processes of differentiation and introjection. Curiosity is suffused with hostility and thus felt to be dangerous. All this impairs the capacity for thinking and learning.

进一步，客体好坏之间的混淆损伤了分化与内摄的过程。好奇心弥漫着敌意，感觉到危险。所有这些损害了思考和学习的能力。

3.4 Retaliation for forced introjection.

对强迫内摄的报复

As result of the envious projection (forcing) of the self into the object to occupy and spoil it, there may be equally fearful fantasies of retaliatory entry into the individual for spoiling.

自体嫉羡性投射（强迫）到客体去占有和破坏的结果，有可能与报复性地进入个体去破坏的可怕幻想是等同的。

3.5 Vicious cycles of greed and destructiveness.

贪婪和毁灭的恶性循环

The anxieties aroused may lead individual to turn away from the source of goodness, or to become greedy and/ or more destructive and hateful. Both the interference of primal splitting and the increased paranoia generated by excessive envy interfere with the move towards the depressive position. Opportunities are thus lessened for the good, satisfying experiences, which can mitigate envy.

Excessive envy in Klein’s view, weakens the ego. This puts the individual at risk of character deterioration, rather than character strengthening in future and adversity.

在Klein看来，嫉羡削弱了自我。 这使个体在未来和面对逆境时性格退化的风险高于强化。

3. 7 Interference with oedipal development.

干扰俄狄浦斯发展

Strong envy is associated with an abnormal oedipal complex in a number of ways. The ordinary jealousies of the “ordinary” Oedipus complex are suffused with more problematic envy. Envy of the mother’s possessions make the fantasies of the combined parental figure more persecuting and persistent. An insecure enviously based relationship with the primal object, can mean that rivalry with the father arises prematurely, with his being seen as a very hostile intruder. Conversely, the libidinal turn from mother to father can be premature and insecure, based as it is on flight from the hated, disappointing mother. To escape from problematic (i.e. envy- ridden ) orality, the move to genitality may be premature, insecure and compulsive.

Some case examples from Klein and Segal will illuminate some of these ideas as well as the technique employed in those relatively early days . First, from Klein herself. In “Envy and gratitude” she describes a number of patients. What is interesting to me about much of this clinical material is the extent to which matters to do with bodily impulses, phantasies and feelings i.e. oral, anal and urethral impulses, feeding, urinating defecating, are so omnipresent .

I will choose one patient from Envy and Gratitude here. This is a relatively analysable woman, p 204-206, and we can see clearly aspects of Klein’s technique-close attention to dream material, to the transference, to envy and spoiling. This seems to me to be s not excessively disturbed patient, compared with some of the others Klein describes later, but I am choosing it to illustrate some of what I have tried to describe so far.

“Klein developed her very concrete vivid language of part objects and bodily functions in work with small children for whom it was meaningful and appropriate. She assumed that infants feel and think in the same way, and further that this is the language of thinking and feeling in everyone’s unconscious. Work since Klein’s day has amply demonstrated that vivid bodily-based fantasies often become conscious in the analysis of adults, especially readily in the case of psychotic and borderline psychotic patients. Some of her more youthful and enthusiastic followers made interpretations in terms of verbal and behavioural content seen in a rigidly symbolic form which now seems likely to have been detrimental to the recognition of a live moment of emotional contact .… There has been a gradual shift from structure to function, that is from an idea that we relate to anatomical part objects towards an idea that we relate to psychological part objects, to the functions of the part object rather than primarily to fit its physical structure. It is the capacity for seeing, touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, remembering, feeling, judging, and thinking, active, as well as passive that are attributed to and perceived in relation to part objects.

Nowadays it is functions rather than anatomical part objectsthat Kleinian analysts look out for in their clinical work and interpretations are likely to be framed, at least initially, in terms of function rather than the language of anatomical structure; in keeping with Klein’s concept of projective identification. These functions are frequently understood as aspect of the self, which are projected into the part object. Melanie Klein today, volume 1, page 5 and volume 2, pages 8 to 9)

Klein came to see the antithesis of envy is gratitude, an expression of love and thus, by implication, the life instinct. She did not develop the concept of gratitude nearly as fully as she did the concept of envy. She explicitly pairs the two concepts in 1957, but the importance of gratitude is a concept arose earlier in her work, especially in her theory of the depressive position.

In 1937 she described the infant’s spontaneous gratitude to the mother for her love and care and also the mother’s gratitude to the infant for affording her the enjoyment of loving him. These are seen as part of love, a manifestation of “innate forces that tend to preserve life”, as opposed to the innate destructive impulses. In her much fuller exposition of gratitude in 1957, she described it as part of the relation to the good object, which is taken in to form the core of the ego.

“In contrast with the infant who, owing to his envy, has been unable to build up securely a good internal object, a child with a strong capacity for love and gratitude has a deep- rooted relation with a good object and can, without being fundamentally damaged, withstand temporary states of envy, hatred and grievance which arise even in children who are loved and well mothered” (page 187)

Gratitude is closely bound up with true generosity and gives a sense of inner wealth. Klein sees the capacity for gratitude like the tendency towards envy as partially innately determined but, once again, influenced by the environment as well.

感恩与慷慨靠得非常近，有一丝内在富足的味道。Klein把感恩的才能倾向看得坏人嫉羡一样：部分由先天决定，同时也受环境影响。

Once again we turn to Elizabeth Spillius. In her paper “Varieties of envious experience” , she coined the term “ the generosity of acceptance “ and I will quote at length from her paper now and later in this presentation as it seems to add an additional dimension to Klein’s work .

She writes “ Let us suppose that the giver takes pleasure in giving further that he is not giving in order to establish superiority over the receiver. Let us suppose too that the receiver is able to perceive this accurately and to realise that the giver knows that he, the receiver, might resent being given to. In this type of giving and this type of perception by the receiver, it is likely to be easier for the receiver to acknowledge envy and feel positive feelings as well; in particular, the receiver may feel able to give something back to the giver in the form of feeling pleasure as well as some resentment about being given to. If the giver can recognise and accept this return gift, this gratitude, a benign circle may be set up in which both parties give something of value to each other. The receiver’s capacity to be given to his return gift of the original giver. Goodness in the other becomes bearable, even enjoyable. The receiver introjects and identifies with an object who enjoys giving and receiving, and an internal basis for admiration can develop and hence emulation of the generous giver becomes possible.

Let us suppose, by contrast, that the giver takes little pleasure in giving-that he is narcissistic and uninterested in the receiver, or that he is outright actually hostile or inconsistent towards the receiver, or feels that the receiver is making unreasonable demands or draining his resources unfairly; or suppose that the giver gives his eagerly and with pleasure, but only in order to demonstrate his superiority over the receiver etc. Or further let us suppose that he gives reluctantly and unwillingly because he is trying to conceal the fact that he feels what he is giving is bad; And still further let us suppose of the giver’s lack of genuine pleasure and generosity is accurately perceived by the receiver

In any of these examples envy is likely to be exacerbated; pleasure in receiving cannot easily develop, and the receiver will not readily feel grateful. The receiver is likely to feel resentful and to give as little as possible back to the giver. The giver deprived of gratitude gives less, or more aggressively and the deprivation-envy circle continues.

So somewhat paradoxically, envy is likely to be greatest when the giving object is felt to give little or badly .The receiver takes in and identifies with the giver- object who does not enjoy giving and receiving, and the vicious cycle is perpetuated internally . Genuine emulation becomes very difficult and is likely to involve splitting, projection and a takeover of the giver’s power, like Mrs B’s identification with my Ph.D..

She goes on further “ I have not tried to exhaust possible variations and it is obvious that they can be very complex interactions of giving receiving further response by the original giver and yet further, but response by the receiver. One only has to think of an hour or two in the life of the mother and baby were sessional to in the course of an analysis to realise how conflicts these interactions and changes can be.”

So who is this Mrs B in Spillius’ case example ? (Spillius in contemporary Kleinians p 158-162)

那么在Spillius 的案例中谁是B太太呢？（Spillius, 《当代克莱因》，158-162页）

She describes Mrs B, a woman who had a deep sense of grievance, and who’s impenitent experiencing of envy is virtually conscious. Her definition of envy is different from Spillius’-as Spillius puts it “What I regard as envy she regards as justified grievance” (156)

This paper by Spillius is important in that she distinguished between 2 types of envy

Spillius在这篇重要文章中区分了两种类型的嫉羡。

On the one hand there is what she calls “ego dystonic envy ; on the other, what she calls ego syntonic or “impenitent “ envy .

一个是她称为“自我矛盾的嫉羡”，另一个她称为自我谐振的或“不知悔改的”嫉羡。

The ego dystonic envy tends to be unconscious, associated with painful loss and guilt over destructiveness . This is the envy described by Klein. This Envy is mainly ucs, contained, and defined by the analyst as Envy. It rarely expressed itself directly; however its Ucs operation leads to inhibition, sometimes severe of the patients creativity in work and personal relationships. Conscious envy in these patients emerges late in the analysis associated with Intense guilt. The experience of envy is ego dystonic, or perhaps more accurately consciousness dystonic.

Impenitent envy is closer to consciousness, expressed more or less self righteously, often in the form of a grievance. The case example of Mrs B is more in this latter category.

不知悔改的嫉羡是意识层面的，或多或少正义地表达，常常以牢骚委屈的形式表现。B夫人的例子更想是后一种类型。

In these cases the patient is more aware of the envy, as is the outside observer. This is envy without guilt. Kernberg describes it in patients with narcissistic personality disorder. The patient here often feels profoundly unlovable, inferior, and he projects these onto those towards he then feels superior. Thus the person with impenitent envy lives in a world where there are some who are unfairly superior to him and others who are justifiably inferior. (154) As she puts it “Feeling perpetual blame and grievance, however miserable, is less painful than mourning the loss of relationships one wishes one had had “(p.154) As Schafer comments, so many patients in analysis present with a virtually intransient implicitly envious position of being filled with a grievance (p 142)

Envy in Klein’s view is affected by the environment in complex ways. There is always a complex interaction between environment and constitution.

在Klein的观点中，环境以复杂的方式影响着嫉羡。环境和结构之间总是有着复杂的相互作用。

Klein sees the infant is having a fantasy of an inexhaustible breast. When the infant is deprived, the breast is hated and envy for apparently, in a mean-spirited way, keeping these riches to itself. However, the satisfying breast is also envied. Klein (1957) “the very ease with which the milk comes, although the infant feels gratified by it, also gives rise to envy because this gift seems something so unattainable” . Klein goes on to link this infantile situation with the analytical observation that patients may become destructively critical of work that is helpful:

“The envious patient grudges the analyst the success of his work: and if he feels that the analyst and the help he is giving have become spoiled and devalued by his envious criticism, he cannot introject him sufficiently as a good object”. I think it is fair to say that Klein did put more of an emphasis on constitutional i.e. inherited factors in the early emotional life of infants, than did many other psychoanalysts. To a certain extent, people such as Bowlby working at more or less the same time occupied a very different position, focusing on attachments, observable relationships between mothers and infants, and were much more inclined towards the role of the environment as of supreme importance.

Klein shows through clinical examples how, when the patient becomes conscious of his envy, he may be able to experience guilt and make reparation. She is impressed by the intense pain and depression that many patients experience when attempting to integrate their increasing awareness of making envious attacks on the analyst’s goodness with their conscious positive feelings towards the analyst. This guilty pain can easily prompt a defence of withdrawal back to paranoid-schizoid functioning, as can the pain of consciously recognised envy itself.

When paranoia is very strong, for example, in patients suffering from a psychotic illness, envy is hard to counteract in analysis. Similarly, when envy is strong, paranoia is hard to counteract. Envy will be mitigated more readily when more depressive features predominated in the personality, such patients being more able to experience gratitude and take in what people have to offer.

Envious feelings are generally recognised as a painful part of the human condition, and can mobilise various defences. Defences against envy are often more problematic then envy itself. Klein herself lists what she describes as a “non-exhaustive” list of defences and others have added to it. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the element of envy itself and the defences against it. A list of defences includes

a) Devaluation/denigration of the object. Spoiling, devaluation and ingratitude are involved here and in envy, and defend against experiencing it .The devalued object need no longer be envied . Klein described how for some people this can be characteristic of object relations.

b) Idealisation. If the object is sufficiently idealised, comparisons with oneself become irrelevant and the object then is omnipotently “owned” i.e. the self is aggrandised by association. Alternatively, Idealisation may take the form of denigration of the envied object and idealisation of some other object; or, some aspect of the envied object may be denigrated and others idealised. An idealised object is unstable, and prone to collapse into its opposite. Strong envy will in any case eventually threaten the ideal object too.

c)Identification with the idealised object. Linked to the above, through projection and introjection, the individual feels that he is the possessor of the coveted attributes of the envied object.

认同被理想化了的客体。接着上面讲的，通过投射与认同，个体感觉自己是被嫉羡的客体的值得渴望的特征的所有者。

d) Confusion. Confusion is a result of envy, where the good object is so attacked that it can no longer be clearly distinguished from the bad object

困惑。困惑是嫉羡的结果，好客体被攻击了，不再能够清晰地和坏客体区分开来。

e)Flight from the mother . The flight from the mother to other people, starting with the father who are idealised in order to avoid hostile feelings towards the primary object, becomes a means of protecting the breast-mother. This mechanism fails when envy is too strong, and eventually imbues the new relationships too

g)Devaluation or inhibition of the self. By devaluing his own gifts, the person simultaneously denies envy and punishes himself for it. Avoidance of competition and success is also an attempt to protect a precariously establish good object, lest it be spoiled by situations liable to cause competitive and envious feelings in the self.

h)Greedy internalisation of the breast. By this mechanism the breast becomes possessed and controlled in fantasy by the infant, who thus avoids feeling separate and envious. All good attributed to the breast, can now be owned for the self. However, as Klein puts it “it is the very greed with which this internalisation is carried out, that contains the general failure… A good object, which is well established not only loves the subject, but is loved by it .This does not apply to an idealised one. By powerful and violent possessiveness, the good object is felt to turn into a destroyed persecutor”

i) Projection of envy. One’s own envy may be attributed to others by projection. The individual then sees himself as non-envious, but surrounded by envious others .This contributes to a paranoid sense of the world.

嫉羡的投射。一个人自己的嫉羡可以通过投射而归于别人。个体于是认为自己没有嫉羡，而是被嫉羡的他人包围着。这形成了世界的偏执感。

j) Stirring up the envy in others. There may be a further step in the projection of envy, in that the projection may be actualised. Stirring up envy in others by one’s own success and possessions by projection, is a frequent method of defence in envy. The ultimate ineffectiveness of this method, derives from the persecutory and depressive anxieties to which gives rise.

k) Stifling of love and intensification of hate. Klein thought that this was less painful to bear than the guilt arising from the combination of love, hate and envy ; it may not express itself in hate, but takes the form of indifference. The individual tends to withdraw from people, but this apparent independence is illusory.

l) Acting out. Rosenfeld has described how various forms of acting out are used, in order to perpetuate this split in the personality when integration of the enviously destructive parts of the personality threatens to dawn

Klein herself did not analyse psychotic adults , but close contemporaries of hers did especially Rosenfeld, Segal & Bion , and their findings are likely to have informed the thinking on the topic of envy.

In Bion’s paper “On Arrogance”, he describes how the analyst’s capacity to contain the projections of the patient is an important source of envy, particularly for psychotic or borderline patients. BION saw envy as primarily in opposition to creativity, rather than to gratitude. In his view envy is manifest fundamentally as an ATTACK on any sort of creative link in the mind. Any perceived link between the parental couple must be obliterated, as must anything that symbolises this. Ultimately, and especially in the psychotic personality, links between ideas and hence the process of thought itself attacked and fragmented

The negative therapeutic reaction is a term coined by Freud in 1923, to donate the paradoxical worsening of some patients after a successful piece of therapeutic work has been accomplished. Referring to such patients, Freud wrote that “every partial solution that ought to result, and in other people does result, in an improvement or a temporary suspension of symptoms, produces in them for the time being and exacerbation of their illness.” It should be clear from much of what I’ve said above, that envy will play a significant role in such a negative therapeutic reaction. Klein herself described how a negative therapeutic reaction may set in secondarily, retrospectively attacking a piece of analytic work that has initially clearly been helpful .As Segal wrote about her patient (page 29) : “Powerful unconscious envy often lies at the root of negative therapeutic reaction is and interminable treatments. One can observe this in patients who have a long history of failed previous treatments. It appeared clearly in a patient who came to analysis of the many years of varied psychiatric and psychotherapeutic treatments. Each course of treatment would bring about an improvement, but deterioration would set in after a termination. When he began his analysis, it soon appear that the main problem was the strength of his negative therapeutic reaction. I represented mainly a successful and potent father, and his hatred of and rivalry with this figure was so intense that the analysis, representing my potency as an analyst, was unconsciously attacked and destroyed over and over again.” (p.29)

Her book on envy provoked a storm of disagreement in the BPAS. It was seen as preposterous that such pernicious attacks on goodness were inherent to human nature; that the death instinct of which envy was one expression , was not a viable proposition; that envy is a complex feeling, not immediately derived from instinct; that Klein ignored the environment; that what she described as envy in infants could rather be called “eagerness”; that she was attributing to infants thoughts of which she was not capable; that her theory of envy was a theory of despair, scientifically unproved; and that Kleinian’s preconceived expectations of envy were leading them to find evidence of intractable vicious destructive envy everywhere in their clinical material ! (Spillius 147)

Envy and Gratitude is a seminal and extremely important paper in the history of psychoanalysis, and in the work of Melanie Klein in particular. It is a difficult work to read, and difficult to take on board, as it challenges many one’s own preconceptions about human character, goodness and badness, the possibility of a “death instinct.”.

I do not see it is essentially a pessimistic view of the world, and I do not think that contemporary Kleinians necessarily see envy everywhere, or disregard the importance of the environment. Contemporary Kleinians have moved on from the technique that Klein described, whilst retaining much of what she contributed, discovered and wrote about. I hope that I have given you a flavour of some of what she and some of her followers have suggested, and encourage you to read both the original works by Klein, and subsequent works by, amongst others Segal, Spillius, and more recently authors such as Betty Joseph, John Steiner and Michael Feldman.